Alex Heeney reviews Malou Reymann’s feature film debut, Unruly, which had its world premiere at TIFF 22. Set in 1930s Denmark, mostly on Sprøgo island, which housed an institution for “troubled” and “immoral women,” Unruly never uses the term “eugenics,” but that’s very much its subject.
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Set in 1930s Denmark, mostly on Sprøgo island, which housed an institution for “troubled” and “immoral women,” the film Unruly never uses the term “eugenics”. But that’s very much its subject. The film’s second half pivots around Denmark’s newly introduced forced sterilisation laws, which the head of the Sprøgo institution devised. Though technically not a prison, Sprøgo was an institution where women’s behaviour was policed by other women. The goal was to enforce patriarchal feminine ideals of subservience and domesticity. Many women were raped, fell pregnant, and had their children ripped away from them. The film takes place around the time when forced sterilisation became “an option” for “troubled women”. It essentially became the only way out of the hell that was this island.
Malou Reymann’s feature film debut Unruly has likely taken inspiration from recent scholarly research into the Sprøgo archives. For example, the characters all share names with the few women mentioned. Malou Reymann and co-writer Sara Isabella Jønsson introduce us to most of these horrors. They also thoughtfully connect the eugenics movement to hetero-partriarchy — and the women who enforced it. For the women of Sprøgo, forced sterilisation was just the last indignity. It was not the only indignity nor perhaps even central part of their oppression.
Discovering Sprøgo in the film Unruly
Our entrée into Sprøgo comes through teenage Maren (Emilie Kroyer Koppel). An excellent seamstress in a factory, she spends her nights dancing to jazz and picking up men. Today, we’d tell her to use condoms, and make sure she isn’t getting coerced. In the 1930s, she gets quickly labelled “immoral” by her neighbours. This helps her lose the job she hates (but excels at), now making her guilty of “vagrancy”. For the Child Welfare System, this is enough proof of Maren’s obvious descent into future criminality (and sex work). They take over custody of her and send her to Sprøgo.
There’s an interesting ambivalence to the way Reymann shoots the film’s opening scene. We’re never quite sure how much fun Maren was even having. Dancing with her friend to jazz is joyful. Eyeing, flirting, and picking up men is a fun chase. But as soon as she starts having sex in the bathroom having sex, she looks like she’s in physical pain. Reymann shoots the scene so that Maren and we see her through a mirror. The sound of the music in the dancehall becomes muted, too, making this feel like a private, intimate act. Yet she still feels under surveillance.
Women’s bodies and minds are constantly policed in the film Unruly
That’s because everyone is policing her body, and soon enough, will be trying to brainwash her into policing her own. It’s an open question if she’s having sex for money since she doesn’t seem to enjoy it. She insists she isn’t ‘whoring’, and yet she is looking for a way out of her working class life. Despite the anonymity of her sexual encounters, she may actually be looking for longer term companionship. She doesn’t want to end up like her single mother, wasting away in a factory. For most women, the only ticket out is marriage, and Maren knows it.
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But Maren’s attempts at finding freedom in a seemingly modernising world are what land her in Sprøgo. Her mother has always more concerned for Maren’s safety and future than in shaming Maren for her choices. This leaves Maren is ill-prepared for the hetero-patriarchal eugenicist environment she’s about to face. Maren effectively fails her first examination with the psychiatrist by refusing to answer his insulting questions. She does not yet understand that her rebellion is only seen as proof of her “troubled mental state”.
Soon, she discovers that most of the women at Sprøgo have been there for years. Immediately, she tries to change course after her second deliberately botched interview. She runs after the doctor, begging him to re-examine him. For him and the women who run the institution, this is merely proof that she’s hysterical. Her reasonable panic buys her stay in the euphemistically named “reflection room”: solitary confinement where she’s bound to a bed.
Women enforce the patriarchy in the film Unruly
At every stage of Maren’s incarceration, women do the state’s bidding. A female social worker comes to Maren’s house to talk to her mother about losing custody. A woman runs the temporary institution where Maren gets housed before being transferred to Sprøgo. Women run Sprøgo, doling out punishments like solitary confinement, and teaching the ‘prisoners’ to suppress their individuality. There’s even a poorly fleshed out subplot that suggests a lesbian relationships is happening between some of the higher-ups at Sprøgo. The plotline relies on stereotypes and is mostly just an added layer of hypocrisy: were their relationship found out, they’d become the inmates instead of the wardens.
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For Maren, the hopelessness of Sprøgo is not so much her own entrapment, but watching how effectively the place has persuaded its inhabitants to allow themselves to be brainwashed. The doctor explains to Maren that Sprøgo will teach her the “virtues” needed to rejoin society. We soon learn that this is code for “How To Be An Obedient Wife”: they cook, sew, grow crops, and must never talk back or speak their minds. The irony, of course, is that they will never have the opportunity to actually become wives with children. Time in Sprøgo puts a black mark on the women, and by midway through the film, their only escape would mean giving up a chance at motherhood. Most of the women resign themselves to their existence. But Maren’s spark of rebellion lights their own hidden hopes and dreams of escape. They start to band together.
Sørine, the secondary protagonist of the film Unruly, stands out and steals the show,
The one holdout is Maren’s roommate and guide to the place, Sørine (Jessica Dinnage, who is one of our top twelve emerging actors at TIFF). Sørine keeps her head down, regularly acts as a NARC, is more miserable and downtrodden than the rest, and is also the loneliest. The first time Maren lands in the reflection room, Sørine gives her the hard-learned advice that it’s always best to repent immediately, before you go crazy from the isolation. She has survived by figuring out what the system requires of her, losing herself in the process.
There’s clearly a history of abuse and suffering behind Sørine’s story, but at first, she and Maren just butt heads. Eventually, their experiences become more and more similar, and Sørine emerges as the film’s second, and more complex, protagonist. Reymann and Dinnage effectively excavate Sørine’s dark past and how it affects her complicated and misguided present day actions. Meanwhile, Maren’s presence, and Sørine’s growing empathy for her situation, force Sørine to question her assumptions about the benevolence the institution keeps promising.
Though it can feel overlong, the film’s shift of perspective from Maren’s to Sørine’s in the second half is fruitful. From the start, the mistress of Sprøgo declares Sørine one of the institution’s greatest successes. We watch as Sørine gets ripped apart to gain just a bit more of her own freedom, at very high prices. She also has to un-brainwash herself to even get that far, to learn to demand what she needs rather than hoping that her continued obedience will buy her freedom.
In our review, we suspect the depiction of Sprøgo in the film Unruly may be rosy
I suspect Malou Reymann’s film paints a rather rosy picture of Sprøgo. The accommodations are nicer than Maren’s childhood home. The women all seem well-fed. They work but learn useful skills and don’t seem exploited. The film treats the few rebellions (or tragedies) it depicts like uncommon occurrences. There’s daily psychological abuse, for sure, but it’s often under the veneer of kindness. Everyone claimed to have the women’s (always referred to as girls) best interest in mind. Even the girls ultimately make friends and find some solidarity. I’m sure some of that is true. But institutions of eugenecist policy, whether the residential “schools” of Indigenous genocide in Canda or their equivalent in Sweden for Sami people, tend to be places of much more physical abuse, too.
The history of Sprøgo has become of increasing prominence in Denmark in the last decade: Denmark tourism websites suggest Sprøgo as a great tourist destination. Newspaper articles talk about it as though eugenics is a part of Denmark’s ‘dark’past. Even before the pandemic, when Denmark was one of the first countries to drop all precautions and kill its most vulnerable people at a faster rate than anywhere else, it was still alive and well. I learned from Jennifer Brea’s essential documentary, Unrest, that if you are found to have chronic fatigue syndrome or chronic pain in present day Denmark, you’re committed as a psychiatric patient. Families hide their members who have these conditions for fear of maltreatment by the government.
Unruly is one of four films at TIFF this year to address eugenics without naming it
Unruly is one of four films at TIFF this year to address eugenics without naming it: the fantastic Plan 75, the excellent Stonewalling, and the complicated Bones of Crows. Most people think of eugenics as the forced sterilisations of the past (which is itself a rosier picture than reality). Unruly shows how systemically enforced the sterilisations of the past were. It was part of a larger, crueller, ongoing program of oppression, rather than a one-off horror.
Malou Reymann’s Unruly also comes at a time when the entire world has become so pro-COVID that eugenics is now more passive than active. We aren’t drugging women and having them wake up sterile. Instead, we’re doing nothing to prevent the spread of COVID — which we know can cause lifelong disease, disability, and death — and happily waiting to watch the poor, disabled, and medically vulnerable die. Denmark was a leader in the “do nothing” policy, back in February. It backfired — or worked, depending on how you look at it — by killing off large numbers of its population faster than anywhere else in the world. The rest of the world took this as proof that “let it rip” was a good policy. Unruly serves as a warning that eugenics is never as simple as you’d expect, and goes well beyond forced sterilisations.
Malou Reymann’s film Unruly had its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, where we reviewed it as one of the Best Acquisition Titles at the festival. It is still seeking North American distribution.
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